Art in an Octagon: The Schinkel Pavilion Berlin

The Schinkel Pavilon in Berlin-Mitte is perhaps Germany?s most unconventional art association. Where GDR nomenklatura once held cocktail parties, now Douglas Gordon, Cyprien Gaillard and Isa Genzken hold exhibitions. ... more

O Italia! "The Wind of Hate" by Roberto Cotroneo is a novelUmberto Eco can recommend to anyone who wants to get to know Italy's dark underbelly. It takes place in an imaginary but scarily realistic perma-fascist Italy, where death and death-wishes abound. And Eco can well imagine suicide attacks taking place in Italy. After all: "There was a suicidal impulse in our terrorism too, 'an irresistible death pull, death which can be dealt out to others but which can also come over us too'. And when one of the protagonists watches a policeman dying after shooting him in the neck, he says: 'We didn't do it because we wanted a better world, but because we were the one who wanted to die, because I saw myself in these eyes, my anxiety, my fear, my view into the void in there, this hate of an unsaved land.'"

In the magazine, Susan Dominus portrays the president of Bravo Media, Lauren Zalaznick, a 45-year old former film producer, (Tom Kalin's "Swoon", Larry Clark's "Kids"), who today writes concepts and produces reality-based TV series such as "Project Runway", "Real Housewives", "Top Chef", "Blow Out" that appeal to "competitive, urban, coastal professionals - the gymgoers, the restaurant patrons, the trendy shoppers, the interior decorators" â in short, an advertiser's dream, whose world these shows persiflage, document and deconstruct. And in such an environment, product placement unproblematic. "Insult our intelligence with product placement? Impossible, since we know that they know that we know exactly how this business works. (...) Consider the hairstylist Jonathan Antin on the defunct show 'Blow Out' being filmed making a commercial for his new hair-care line. The plot is that he's a diva. The dialogue is Jonathan Antin saying over and over, as he films different takes for his pitch, some variation of the following: 'Shampoo is an incredibly important first step for your day.' He is laughable, this statement is laughable. And yet, if you sell shampoo, could you ask for a better advertising environment?"

Further articles: Iran is perhaps the only country in the world that the USA has failed to get at. One man, however, has developed a strategy which just might work, writes Robin Wright. Stuart Levey, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, managed, last year, to convince countless banks around the world to stop doing business with Iran. And now that China is producing two-thirds of all the world's pharmaceutical drugs,Gardiner Harris asks whether Chinese manufacturers are safe, because both American and European quality controls are anything but airtight.

If we understand Zadie Smith correctly, Joseph O'Neill's novel "Netherland" has the same target audience as Lauren Zalaznick's TV shows. "It's a novel that wants you to know that it knows you know it knows". Balzacian lyrical realism, whose hero Hans, a Dutch stock analyst, has an authenticity problem. Smith describes a scene in which Hans is arguing with his wife about the Iraq war â this is to say, she is arguing, his thoughts are swiftly elsewhere. Smith quotes: "Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction that posed a real threat? I had no idea; and to be truthful, and to touch on my real difficulty, I had little interest. I didn't really care." For Smith "this conclusion is never in doubt: even as Rachel rages on, Hans's mind wanders repeatedly to the storm, its specks of snow like "small and dark...flies," and also like "a cold toga draped [over] the city." The nineteenth-century flaneur's ennuihas been transplanted to thetwenty-first-century bourgeois's political apathyâand made beautiful. Other people's political engagement is revealed to be simply another form of inauthenticity." Smith prefers Tom McCarthys "Remainder", a novel that follows in the tradition of Robbe-Grillet.

The Observator Cultural has compiled a new dossier on the writer Mircea Nedelciu. Born into a farming family in 1950, he spent 39 years in a totalitarian regime. The remaining ten years of his life he spent fighting Hodgkin's lymphoma. In an introduction to Nedelciu's work, Sanda Cordos quotes from his text "Horizontal Man" in which he confronts death. "The confrontation is inevitable. You have to fight and not try to get out of it. (...) From this point of view, the position of horizontal man can even be an advantage: you cannot fall; you can only advance or retreat (strategically, of course). We'll see where all these strategies lead, but I can say, I have now discovered a number of tricks. With certain opponents, there is no point in fighting without tricks. For example, to describe in detail a healthy foot, the toes that waggle freely up and down, the mobility of a fine ankle, the play of the shins and thighs in dance - all these things place my hideous adversary in a real crisis of uncertainty. It knows already that my legs belong to it, but I am talking about different legs. There are and will be so many!"

Jonathan Litellrecommends the essay "Les elections presidentielles aux Etats Unis" by Roger Persichino (Folio Actuel) which addresses the business of US presidential elections in general. Littell writes: "If, as it seems likely and as we wanted, Barack Obama, is voted into office, many of us will want to understand the nature of the logic and obligations which sway his decisions and determine his capacity to act. Which is why I am convinced of the impossibility of analysing an historical or political phenomenon without a precise understanding of its underlying mechanisms.And Persichino's book communicates precisely this understanding in lucid, pointed and didactic prose, that is of value to Americans and French alike. The next president will be mainly defined by the election campaign which got him into power: to understand that, the hows and the why, is crucial for the aftermath."

Elliot Wilson profiles the ChinaPoly Group, an arm of the People's Liberation Army which is part munitions manufacturer, part real-estate agent. And it also acts as China's de facto ministry of culture, where it is settling restitution issues at a break-neck pace. "While the PLA exerts simple heft, Poly wields a softer form of power. It quietly sponsors Chinese art exhibits that tour the world. When any Chinese art auction takes place, Poly representatives are there to outbid the private buyers. The job of scouring local and foreign markets for China's scattered cultural inheritance is the purview of 41-year-old chief archaeologist Jiang Ying Chun, who works at Poly Culture and Art. His job is to seek out the few remaining Chinese tapestries, vases, sculptures and bronzes in private hands, then buy them with cash raised by selling arms to countries such as Zimbabwe, Sudan and Pakistan. Poly also dips into China's vast foreign exchange reserves - Â£980 billion as of June 2008. 'If Poly needed Â£100 million to buy up all of the world's best remaining bronzes, they would,' says Colin Sheaf, chief China art appraiser at Bonhams auction house in London. 'If they needed a further Â£100 million, that wouldn't be a problem. It's a bottomless pit.'"

In a series of talks commemorating 20 years of transformation in Poland (we reported here on an interview with Tadeusz Mazowiecki), the former finance minister and inventor of economic "shock therapy", Leszek Balcerowicz, talks about his motivation. "No one knew exactly what was happening at the time, but it was clear that capitalism was our only chance to catch up with the West. Everything had to happen very fast. (...) I was fully aware that this was an historic moment of change and that we had to grap the opportunity. Which is why I assumed, that if I was going to make mistakes â which was likely â that it was better to be too radical than not radical enough. You always have to choose which mistakes you most want to avoid."

Eight days before his death last Friday, Studs Terkel, "the man who interviewed America", gave his own last interview. Edward Lifson phoned him to find out what he would ask Barack Obama were he to interview him. The ailing Terkel, who was hanging in there to see the first African-American president, then shouted into the phone: "I'd tell him, 'don't fool around on a few issues, such as health care. We've got bigger work to do! (...) The free market has to be regulated. And the New Deal did that and they provided jobs. The government has to. The WPA provided jobs. We have got to get back to that. We need more reg-u-la-tion.I was just watching Alan Greenspan, he's an idiot, and by the way so was Ayn Rand! Community organizers like Obama know what's going on. If they remember. The important thing is memory. You know in this country, we all have Alzheimer's. Obama has got to remember his days as an organizer." At the end Terkel adds "I'm very excited by the idea of a black guy in the White House, that's very exciting," Studs said as we said goodbye. "I just wish he was more progressive!"

Alice Albinia traveled to Kashgar, the capital of the Chinese Xingjian province with its Sunni-Muslim Uighur majority. Peaceful coexistence here is nothing but propaganda. "Today, if you visit the Id Kah Mosque, you will find state policy displayed in broken English on a signboard: 'All ethnic groups live friendly together here. They co-operate to build a beautiful homeland ... and oppose ethnic separation and illegal religious activities.' Unsurprisingly, given the level of interference by the state, many Uighurs see the Chinese as invaders who threaten their culture and religion. While Beijing remains intent on importing Han people and commerce to Xinjiang, in the streets north of the mosque there is still quiet resistance. Here, where old men play chess in ornately painted teahouses and stallholders sell a teeth-cracking sweet made from crushed walnuts, it is common to meet old women who speak no Mandarin, artisans who consider China a foreign land, and traders who refuse to follow Beijing time." And men who complain that women are not forbidden from wearing headscarves in schools or government jobs.

Eastern Europeans are either blaming the finance crisis on each other (the Poles are blaming the Hungarians and the Romanians the Bulgarians), on the west ("they've abandoned us again"), or their own incompetent political elites. ForEszter Babarczy, this reaction has dangerous echoes of German Nazi rhetoric: "Of course the Eastern Europen tendency to pass the buck will not lead us into a world war, but it does lead to the feeling that we are constantly at the mercy of 'outside' circumstances and so every crisis comes as a surprise. If you constantly blame the others, you will never learn anything, nor will you learn to solve problems alone."

Tuesday 27 March, 2012

The Republicans are waging a war against women, the New York Magazine declares. Perhaps it's because women are so unabashed about reading porn in public - that's according to publisher Beatriz de Moura in El Pais Semanal, at least. Polityka remembers Operation Reinhard. Tensions are growing between Poland and Hungary as Victor Orban spreads his influence, prompting ruminations on East European absurdity from both Elet es Irodalom and salon.eu.sk. Wired is keeping its eyes peeled on the only unassuming sounding Utah Data Center.read more

Tuesday 20 March, 2012

In Telerama, Benjamin Stora grabs hold of the Algerian boomerang. In Eurozine, Slavenka Drakulic tells the Venetians that they should be very scared of Chinese money. Bela Tarr tells the Frankfurter Rundschau and the Berliner Zeitung that his "Turin Horse", which ends in total darkness was not intended to depress. In die Welt, historian Dan Diner cannot agree with Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands": National Socialism was not like Communism - because of Auschwitz.
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Tuesday 13 March, 2012

In Perfil author Martin Kohn explains why Argentina would be less
Argentinian if it won back the Falklands. In Il sole 24 ore, Armando
Massarenti describes the Italians as a pack of illiterates sitting atop a
treasure trove. Polityka introduces the Polish bestseller of the season:
Danuta Walesa's autobiography. L'Express looks into the state of
Japanese literature one year after Fukushima.
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Tuesday 6 March, 2012

In Merkur,Stephan Wackwitz muses on poetry and absurdity in Tiflis. Outlook India happens on the 1980s Indian answer to "The Artist". Bloomberg Businessweek climbs into the cuckoo's nest with the German Samwar brothers. Salon.eu.sk learns how to line the pockets of a Slovenian politician. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Navid Kermanireports back impressed from the Karachi Literature Festival. read more

Tuesday 21 February, 2012

The New Republic sees a war being waged in the USA against women's rights. For Rue89, people who put naked women on the front page of a newspaper should not be surprised if they go to jail. In Elet es Irodalom, historian Mirta Nunez Daaz-Balart explains why the wounds of the Franco regime never healed. In Eurozine, Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev see little in common between the protests in Russia and those in the Arab world.
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Tuesday 7 February, 2012

Poland's youth have taken to the streets to protest against Acta and Donald Tusk has listened, Polityka explains. Himal and the Economist report on the repression of homosexuality in the Muslim world. Outlook India doesn't understand why there will be no "Dragon Tattoo" film in India. And in Eurozine, Slavenka Drakulic looks at how close the Serbs are to eating grass.
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Tuesday 31 January, 2012

In the French Huffington Post, philosopher Catherine Clement explains why the griot Youssou N'Dour had next to no chance of becoming Senegal's president. Peter Sloterdijk (in Le Monde) and Umberto Eco (in Espresso) share their thoughts about forgetting. Al Ahram examines the post-electoral depression of Egypt's young revolutionaries. And in Eurozine, Kenan Malik defends freedom of opinion against those who want the world to go to sleep.
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Tuesday 24 January, 2012

Il Sole Ore weeps at the death of a laughing Vincenzo Consolo. In Babelia, Javier Goma Lanzon cries: Praise me, please! Osteuropa asks: Hungaria, quo vadis? The newborn French Huffington Post heralds the birth of the individual in the wake of the Arab Spring. Outlook India is infuriated by the cowardliness of Indian politicians in the face of religious fanatics.
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Tuesday 17 January, 2012

In Nepszabadsag the dramatist György Spiro recognises 19th century France in Hungary today. Peter Nadas, though, in Lettre International and salon.eu.sk, is holding out hope for his country's modernisation. In Open Democracy, Boris Akunin and Alexei Navalny wish Russia was as influential as America - or China. And in Lettras Libras, Peter Hamill compares Mexico with a mafia film by the Maquis de Sade.
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Tuesday 10 January, 2012

Are books about to become a sort of author-translator wiki, asks Il Sole 24 Ore. Rue 89 reports on the "Tango Wars" in downtown Buenos Aires. Elet es Irodalom posits a future for political poetry. In Merkur, Mikhail Shishkin encounters Russian pain in Switzerland. Die Welt discovers the terror of the new inside the collapse of the old in Andrea Breth's staging of Isaak Babel's "Maria". And Poetry Foundation waits for refugees in Lampedusa. read more

Tuesday 13 December, 2011

Andre Glucksman in Tagesspiegel looks at the impact of the Putinist plague on Russia and Europe. In Letras Libras Martin Caparros celebrates the Kindle as book. György Dalos has little hope that Hungary's intellectuals can help get their country out of the doldrums. Le Monde finds Cioran with his head up the skirt of a young German woman. The NYT celebrates the spread of N'Ko,the West African text messaging alphabet.read more